Without romanticizing the sixties-that-I-missed, this does seem to be part of a long-term transformation in student attitudes. UCLA's HERI poll of incoming undergraduates shows very marked shifts in what's important to incoming students over the last 40+ years. Forty years ago, non-remunerative and at least vaguely intellectual goals showed up near the top of the list. Now the list is dominated by money-earning. This is plausibly related to the end of the postwar boom, but my late-seventies experience in college makes me think that something else is going on. Campuses became much more conservative during those years, and did so quite rapidly. This was during a time when you could still come out of college with very modest debt (mine was a bit over $3,000 - and I relied on aid and student employment for the vast majority of my college costs), and there was not yet a sense that the good economic times of the previous decade were gone forever.
But now I think that the humanities (in which I include the social "sciences") are mostly dead at most universities, living on primarily in virtue of bloated (and usually formless) general education requirements. Those universities are in fact polytechnics with liberal arts colleges glued on. At the other end of the scale are the elite institutions where the humanities are in fine shape.
There are still a good number of elite liberal arts and science colleges where students study nothing else, and many of the elite universities do not offer vocationally-oriented undergraduate degrees. Eagleton, of course, comes from one of the few English universities that has not been taken over by the twenty-year wave of polytechnicization.
----- Original Message ---- From: Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Mon, December 20, 2010 10:08:28 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Terry Eagleton on "The death of universities"
[WS:] This piece focuses too much on the supply side, while ignoring the demand side. Based on my personal observations, the demand (i.e. students) tend to favor what Foucault aptly termed "knowledge-power" or scientific discipline fused with social control. This entails either highly technical-manipulative disciplines such as law applied mathematics (or mathematical economics) and engineering, or high social status disciplines, such as policy analysis and business management. There is very little demand for "classical" disciplines (not just humanities and sociology, but also natural sciences like astronomy,) and if they were not required classes, very few would bother to take them.
What Joanna observes about the relationship between humanities and elite status is, for the most part, the demand side phenomenon. Students born to "old money" are more likely to prefer the humanities than wannabe rich.
Wojtek
On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 8:45 AM, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/17/death-universities-ma
> laise-tuition-fees
>
> The Guardian
> 17 December 2010
>
> *The death of universities
>
> Academia has become a servant of the status quo. Its malaise runs so much
> deeper than tuition fees*
>
> Terry Eagleton
>
> Are the humanities about to disappear from our universities? The question
> is
> absurd. It would be like asking whether alcohol is about to disappear
> from
> pubs, or egoism from Hollywood. Just as there cannot be a pub without
> alcohol, so there cannot be a university without the humanities. If
> history,
> philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their
> wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research
> institute.
> But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and
> it
> would be deceptive to call it one.
>
> Neither, however, can there be a university in the full sense of the word
> when the humanities exist in isolation from other disciplines. The
> quickest
> way of devaluing these subjects – short of disposing of them altogether –
> is
> to reduce them to an agreeable bonus. Real men study law and engineering,
> while ideas and values are for sissies. The humanities should constitute
> the
> core of any university worth the name. The study of history and
> philosophy,
> accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for
> lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.
> If
> the humanities are not under such dire threat in the United States, it
> is,
> among other things, because they are seen as being an integral part of
> higher education as such.
>
> When they first emerged in their present shape around the turn of the
> 18th
> century, the so-called humane disciplines had a crucial social role. It
> was
> to foster and protect the kind of values for which a philistine social
> order
> had precious little time. The modern humanities and industrial capitalism
> were more or less twinned at birth. To preserve a set of values and ideas
> under siege, you needed among other things institutions known as
> universities set somewhat apart from everyday social life. This
> remoteness
> meant that humane study could be lamentably ineffectual. But it also
> allowed
> the humanities to launch a critique of conventional wisdom.
>
> >From time to time, as in the late 1960s and in these last few weeks in
> Britain, that critique would take to the streets, confronting how we
> actually live with how we might live.
>
> What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as
> centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has
> been
> to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice,
> tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or
> alternative visions of the future. We will not change this simply by
> increasing state funding of the humanities as opposed to slashing it to
> nothing. We will change it by insisting that a critical reflection on
> human
> values and principles should be central to everything that goes on in
> universities, not just to the study of Rembrandt or Rimbaud.
>
> In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how
> indispensable they are; and this means insisting on their vital role in
> the
> whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like
> some
> poor relation, they don't cost much to be housed.
>
> How can this be achieved in practice? Financially speaking, it can't be.
> Governments are intent on shrinking the humanities, not expanding them.
>
> Might not too much investment in teaching Shelley mean falling behind our
> economic competitors? But there is no university without humane inquiry,
> which means that universities and advanced capitalism are fundamentally
> incompatible. And the political implications of that run far deeper than
> the
> question of student fees.
>
>
>
> Jim Farmelant
> http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
> www.foxymath.com
> Learn or Review Basic Math
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